Expect the unexpected

My second day of SESUR research was a full plunge into lab work. The most important lesson I learned today was to always expect the unexpected during the research process. I went to bed last night excited to measure the difference in arsenic sorption between standard and field-sample clays in the presence of calcium ions... and arrived in the lab this morning to learn that we'd be tweaking the experiment significantly in order to focus on the effects of different types of cations on arsenic sorption on standard clays. If that was confusing, basically where I thought I would be comparing two clay types I'll now only be using one, and where I thought I'd only be dealing with one type of cation I'll now be working on an experiment with three - calcium, barium, and lithium.

It was an immediate lesson in flexibility - something Richard Nevle, the fantastic SESUR program director, had reminded us many times is essential to all types of research. Having my "mini-project" completely change course on day two certainly reinforced that point for me in a more concrete way. In the spirit of adapting, I didn't hesitate, and Sarah and I jumped right into work. We were accompanied by Mariela, a SURGE (Summer Undergraduate Research in Geoscience & Engineering, a similar program to SESUR but open to students from other universities and aimed at juniors and seniors) participant whose primary mentor is also currently traveling, like mine.

Today was a long day so that we could finish preparing our samples and give them time to shake for about 40 hours before our scheduled time on the ICP-MS (Inductively Coupled Plasma Mass Spectroscopy, and yes, I've learned to say the full name correctly!) machine on Thursday afternoon. We had to label 38 tiny bottles (and some larger ones), make 19 carefully-mixed stock solutions with different cation concentrations, pipette them into the little bottles, and (the most mind-numbingly boring part of all) measure 30 mg of clay powder into each bottle. I had no idea how small 30 mg of powder is until I spent an hour getting each sample to exactly 30 mg on the balance, adding or removing a few particles of clay powder at a time. I certainly didn't expect to do that either, but it had to be done. I wonder what unexpected things will happen for the rest of the summer...